"Tarantino meets Ritchie" says a critical blurb of DEAD IN FRANCE, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Germophobic hitman Charles (Brian Levine, who also produced) hires sexy cleaning woman Lisa (Celia Muir) to give his recently-purchased Cannes home a good going-over while he is out of town taking care of his completing his hundredth and final kill. The assignment goes off without a hitch and Charles takes a detour in order to purchase a yacht (which he plans to sail off into the sunset with his ideal woman, who he has not even met) only to have his $2 million pound payment stolen from the trunk of his car by socially-challenged theif Raymond (James Privett) who is in cahoots with brother Simon (Lee Cheney). While Charles pursues the pair in search of his money, Lisa's boyfriend Denny (Darren Bransford, PSYCHOSIS) shows up to at the house to work a scam with Lisa to bilk prospective tenants out of downpayments on renting Charles' house (only for Denny to complicate things further when he finds one of Charles' guns and decides to make things more interesting). And then there's Clancy (Kate Loustau, INBETWEENERS), a psychotic assassin - who's also a lesbian, just because... - who shows up in Cannes in search of Charles who underbid her on a high-profile kill and plans to retire before she can get even with him professionally (so now she just wants the money from the hit).

Slickly-shot in the black and white (in high definition) - by writer/director/editor Kris McManus (who recruited a handful of castmembers from his previous venture TRAVELLERS) - albeit in a manner that is more suggestive of perfume commercials than of a sixties crime thrillers set on the Continent, DEAD IN FRANCE starts off well but quickly sacrifices the potential of deadpan black comedy in favor of heaping helpings of the aforementioned "Tarantino meets Ritchie" type posturing with an apparently decent cast that just can't live up to the would-be snappy dialogue (peppered with the usual expletives without the deft touch that makes such lines quotable in other films). The CGI gore is only intermittently effective, depriving the audience of seeing the increasingly obnoxious characters receive their splattery just-deserts (although the effects artists certainly try). If you enjoyed DUST UP (to name another film from U.S. distributor Breaking Glass Pictures' catalog), then you might give this one a try.